Apple CEO Tim Cook said the iPhone and iPad had become “essential tools” for the modern workforce. Apple has said that more than 95 percent of large companies have employees using its products, mostly because they insist on being able to use their personal devices for work.

“Via this engineering and go-to-market partnership, we’re providing our joint clients the power to seamlessly prolong that superior Cisco setting to their favourite iOS units”.

San Francisco, CA – Apple Inc.is teaming up with Cisco Systems Inc.to make its mobile devices work better with corporate networks using Cisco’s equipment, part of a push by Apple to expand sales to business customers.

For now, the companies intend to make iPhones better collaboration tools in Cisco-powered video and voice environments, aiming for “a seamless experience between iPhones and [desk phones]”. Moreover, Cisco will also assist Apple in developing ways in which iPhones can interact more easily with the office phones of the employees.

“Apple and Cisco has announced their partnership today to enhance the iOS users” experience.

The joint development of the networking technology for the iOS platform will allow businesses to ‘prioritize network traffic, ‘ through mobile operating system changes.

The firms are somewhat unlikely allies, with Cisco suing Apple back in 2007 for violating its trademark of the “iPhone”, a name Cisco acquired in 2000 when it bought a small device company.

But Cisco also posted $4 billion worth of revenue in its collaboration business unit, which includes its WebEx and Spark business. Last year, Cook announced a partnership with IBM, another one-time adversary, to “transform enterprise mobility”. Through that collaboration, dubbed MobileFirst, the companies eventually aim to develop more than 100 business apps for the iPhone and iPad focused on users in specific industries such as healthcare and transportation, among others.

Apple is slated to unwrap the next version of its iPhone at an event in San Francisco on September 9. And yet here was Apple, deep in negotiations with Cisco, brazenly making off with that same name for its new cellphone (we weren’t all calling them smartphones yet).